Racing's 'first lady' broke mould

'I WAS at a murder once," Robin Levett wrote of a real-life experience in a novella of her time in Rangoon, when the victim, who was seated next to her, was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range. As he slumped forward, blood gushed into her lap.

The macabre incident, at an officers' club in the then Burmese capital just after World War II ended  she was serving in the Women's Auxiliary Service, Burma (Wasbees)  turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. The killer thought the officer seated at the dining table next to Levett was another officer he suspected was having an affair with his wife.

Levett's life was filled with excitement, albeit nothing quite matching the horror of Rangoon, and she went on to become a daring pilot, parachutist, an author of note  after turning 70  and most famously, the first lady of Australian horse racing.

For 30 years she bred and raced thoroughbreds around Australia and became the first women to be elected president of a major turf club (Kilmore). This, in turn, led to her selection in the mid-1990s as the inaugural holder of the title "First Lady of Australian Racing".

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Levett, who has died of bronchial pneumonia while under sedation for cancer at Castlemaine Hospital, aged 82, was a trailblazer from young and lit up company wherever she went.

One of three girls born to Major Geoffrey Walker and his wife, Aileen (nee Whiting), of Sorrento, she attended The Hermitage School, from where she was expelled for setting it alight. But she was a bright student and went on to be head girl at Toorak College, Mount Eliza, where she won the top prize in 1943.

With war raging and the travelling part of the scholarship in abeyance, she believed she could still travel by joining the navy. Disillusioned by a posting to Albert Park, she resigned and joined the Wasbees. That took her to Rangoon.

Back after the war, she married Geoffrey Levett in the early 1950s; he was a prominent producer and distributor of frozen vegetables. She saw a role for herself in the business and learnt to fly so that she could take her husband on his far-flung rounds.

Not content with a private pilot's licence, she gained a commercial licence  and, perhaps as extra insurance, also learnt to make parachute jumps. She flew in an air race around Victoria.

Levett and her husband became involved in horse racing in the early '60, when they leased a filly called Never on Sunday. The filly did very well for them, and in no time they were attracted to breeding as well as racing.

First she ran the Lyndhurst Lodge stud at Cranbourne, then for a short time both Lyndhurst and the Willowmavin Stud at Kilmore, before finally settling on Willowmavin. The Levetts won the VRC Derby (1966) and St Leger (1967) with Khalifa, the Perth and Brisbane cups  the best finish they enjoyed in the Melbourne Cup was third  and countless lesser races. They also co-owned Buoyant Bird with former prime minister Bob Hawke.

Besides her tireless work on the committee of the Kilmore Turf Club, Levett found time to run a wildlife refuge at Willowmavin. Guests in the committee room at Flemington would be bemused when she would pull a young wombat from a large shoulder bag and feed it from a bottle.

One of her lifelong delights was fly-fishing, inherited from her father and passed on to her sons, Michael and Jeremy. This made two places in the world special to her  London Lakes, a trout fishing lodge in Tasmania, and the paradise of mountains and trout-filled rivers in Kashmir.

When her husband Geoffrey died in 1990, she was forced to sell her beloved Willowmavin, but rather than opt for a quiet life, she started writing  and a third career blossomed. It led to the third name by which she is remembered after she married her publisher, Nick Hudson. However, she retained the name Robin Levett for all her books, the most successful of which was The Girls. Based on her childhood as the youngest of three girls  both her sisters, Jenny and Betty, had died when she wrote the book  the work figured twice in The Age bestseller lists. Another book, Bloodstock, was named by The Sydney Morning Herald as the best book on Australian racing.

She also wrote about the paradise and hell of Kashmir in The Shikari; the book has two topics, fly-fishing and civil war, and some people think it is her finest. She also supported several families in Kashmir.

Levett's darkest moment came in the mid-1980s with the death of her younger son, Jeremy. It was even worse, she said, than when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given at most 16 months to live.

She simply got on with living and lasted another four productive years in which she made two long trips overseas trips, as well as several within Australia as far as Darwin and the tip of Cape York. Nor did she let up as an indefatigable hostess.

She is survived by her husband, Nick, whom she married at his 70th birthday party (she was 77) at Ascot Vale, son Michael and his partner Chrissie, daughter-in-law Sally and grandchildren Anna and Sam.

Family and friends will gather at Kilmore Turf Club today to give Robin Levett a fitting send-off. This tribute was prepared with the help of Nick Hudson.